Building Better Products With People (Part I in a series): About yourself
Here are a range of topics (in some kind of order) I’ll cover in future:
• Hiring
• About the business
• About your data
• Your ambition
• Getting it wrong (is easier than getting it right)
• Culture(s) and recruiting around the world
• Sustainability, retention, and artificial glass ceilings
• Doing nothing
• Your work here is donePlease feedback, and let me know if any of this resonates, or drop me a DM.
About yourself
If you’re involved in any part of the Design (Big D) process you’re going to be building with people.
You have your craft skill, your generalisation, and your niche. But what you might not recognise is that beyond you, your discipline and your team, are a tonne of other factors that will ultimately influence what ends up in the hands of your users.
This in and of itself is not huge news. It’s not a vast concept. You’ve probably seen T-shape diagrams before. Empathy across the top, craft skill sat vertically.
It’s really easy to forget the horizontal when you’re doing your job. You’re probably empathetic and you have experience working with others; but the fact is without that horizontal nothing would get done. Ever.
So what kind of T are you? Or, as in my case, are you a broken comb?
If you’re in the position of building teams, then you are likely to have a few years under your belt of doing what you do. You’ve been led and you’re ready to take on the next big challenge…leading people.
I know lots of very experienced individuals who have absolutely no interest in leading people or management in general. It takes them away from their craft, and management can be a bit ‘meh’. I’ve had many roles where as a leader I’ve had to relinquish the fun, messy stuff. Yes, you get to do a bit more of the horizon thinking, but you will more than likely miss out on the day-to-day working in groups, on chewy problems. Your craft skills will fade, and you will only be useful some of the time, and at certain moments.
However, a huge part of your role - and to some extent what you might consider your new and improvable skill - is People Design. If you like Design and you like People and what People can bring to the Design table, then you’ll probably enjoy People Design or Building With People (BWP).
Experience is necessary
There are far too many articles, posts, Tweets (X’s?), whatever on the unfairness of a Design career being so achievable. “The bar’s too low!” “Three months on a part time course doesn’t make you a designer!” “You can’t be an engineer after reading one book, how come…!” etc., etc.
Well, I sympathise. Design can appear to be a pretty easy thing to step into if you put in the effort. Design is very much learnable. Design is also highly subjective. Whatever industry you work in — supplier or client-side — Design will be the one thing everyone will have an opinion on, whether you like it or not. You can push back with theory, and rules around accessibility, and best practice, but you will potentially be one voice against many. Engineers, on the whole, don’t have this problem; I don’t think I’ve ever sat in a meeting where code has been picked apart as much as a three column grid. Execution, maybe, but the guts of a product, not so much.
When I was running Hactar with Andy (my co-founder) we had a long conversation about how we were going to sell what we did. It boiled down to:
The value of Design — to most stakeholders — is unquantifiable and subjective. It has *waves hands* this much value. But I know what I like.
Code (however good it might be) is unsellable. It usually means very little to the person with the chequebook. It very quietly makes things go.
So how do we price what we do competitively? And what are we actually selling?
The answer was us. We were selling us, and the team and our collective reputations. We had a portfolio of work, a roster of clients, some nice testimonials, but the way we won work was by presenting ourselves and our studio in an approachable light.
This, I think, was when I first started thinking about Building With People. We weren’t cheap and we only did things a certain way — a proven way. We were also quite picky with the kinds of clients we wanted to work with. If that’s not operating with one hand behind one’s back, I don’t know what is.
The best way for us to help clients see the world in a similar way to us (build the best / smallest / smartest thing you can for the money you have to advance your cause) was to introduce them to the people we’d managed to hire, and tell the story of the team. Not sycophantic storytelling, or telling the client what you think they want to hear. Proper, authentic, identifiable storytelling is how you sell Design and code and strategy. That’s how you present a case for doing things a certain way. That’s how you sell the unquantifiable and subjective.
None of this would have been possible without experience. See, I came back to it. You cannot hire without experience. You cannot lead without experience. You cannot sell without experience. You can try, and given how many mistakes I’ve made with experience, I’d hate to be around to clear up the mess without it.
Experience is the sum of success and failure. I’d say I’ve learned more from the latter than the former. Mis-hiring, miscommunicating, mis-quoting, mis-remembering…lots of Mis’. One solid project and one on-time delivery does not experience make.
Experience can be garnered from sharing, and reading, and playing, and building, and testing. And living. Every interaction you have in and out of work will nurture you and grow your empathy.
What makes a leader
There’s some mixed thinking on how long it takes to make a judgement of someone. Seven seconds or 1/10 of a second. Either way it’s not long and if you’re hiring for a role then you’ll have that amount of time and your reputation to make an impression on the candidate.
Most job ads have a ‘you’ll report to’ line in there somewhere. And most job applicants will have done a bit of sleuthing before they get as far as a screener. At the point they get to meet you for the first time they’ll have a preconceived notion about who you are, what you stand for, who you’ve worked with, and they may already be some kind of connection on LinkedIn.
In my experience, people who’ve applied for a role want to:
a) work for the business / believe in the product
b) work with you
c) both [1]
d) clutching at straws and applying for anything
The challenging one is b). Your ego has been stroked, but you’re running a huge risk of failing at your job as a result. You didn’t join the business to have the pleasure of working with ‘yourself’ or learning from ‘yourself’. Nope. You likely joined because a) and b)…whoever b) is / was. And you probably weren’t hired to become the totem. Yes, an organisation will want you to attract talent, but not at the expense of their future stability.
Part of leadership is being able to show those who work with you and report into you where their allegiances should lie. If you move on or you’re exited from a company, and if you’ve done your job properly, your team will stick it out. Their loyalty should be to the job, not to you. You can’t have a full-blown Dead Poets Society situation going on. Any more than 10% churn and I’d say you’ve not performed in your role as a leader.
Performing in your role isn’t just about having a happy team, insulated in their work. If you spend more of your time protecting them from the rest of the business — again — you’re not doing your job properly. Leading is not just maintaining the people who report into you, it’s ensuring that they also have healthy relationships with other disciplines. I’d go so far as to say that a solid +40% of your time should be spent with your peers and their team leads. You’re leading by example; if you can demonstrate and foster strong cross-disciplinary connections then the huge and unnecessary time-suck of having to be the voice of reason when conflict arises between teams will evaporate. And that time-suck can be absolutely huge and absolutely unnecessary. Those nice little gaps in your calendar will be filled with mediation sessions and one-to-ones where you have to talk people down from various fits of pique.
‘Oh yes, that’s all well and good, I bet you’ve never had to do that’, I hear you say, somewhat sarcastically. And you’d be right. I’ve had to do that loads. And it’s not healthy. As a leader it’s all too easy to become a counsellor, and something of a non-judgemental ear. Your team will love you for it, and it can feel very rewarding as a result, but it’s really not what you’re being paid to do. In the same way checking emails first thing feels like a productive activity, it’s not. It’s a surefire way to sludge your brain for a morning, so that when you need to get down to some actual thinking, the task in front of you somehow feels insurmountable.
There are obviously all sorts of leadership styles out there, and I’m convinced that depending on where you work (location / culture / industry) there will be one that fits. Personally I’ve found that some kind of servant leader approach works best with Designers (remember, Big D). That’s serving for the greater good. Your team and the business come first.
There will be instances where you’re absolutely tested; the JFDI edict is something you’ll only get used to over time. If you have the right kind of relationship with those above you, you’ll likely see these coming and be able to steel yourself for the task ahead. It might make no sense to you, you might not get a decent reason for why the thing needs to be done, and you may disagree completely with what’s being requested. That being said, now and again, you need to suck it up and get on [2]. That’s the easy bit.
Trickier is selling this to the team. If you’ve done a decent job of demonstrating your leadership style — not just talking it — at worst your team will likely huff a bit but understand that sometimes you have to swallow your opinions and Do Your Best Work. There’s nothing more frustrating for a leader than seeing a team half-arse a project because the individuals executing it don’t believe it should be done. Bottom line: you get paid to do your best work.
If Your People aren’t on board the output will be crap. Guaranteed.
Part II: Hiring
[1] Or (in these challenging times) none of the above, they just need a job, any job.
[2] This excludes nasty stuff — always push back against the nasty stuff.
